Quick Take
- Craft World hits 240K wallets with no airdrops or token bait
- Ronin backs VOYA’s gameplay-first model and ad-based monetization
- Project Voyager ties games together with Dyno Coin on mainnet
Ronin Network is backing one of Web3’s few breakout games still growing in 2025. Craft World, the dinosaur-themed crafting title from VOYA Games, has surpassed 240,000 active wallets and 1.1 million on-chain trades—all without token rewards or airdrops.
In a new interview by Funjible Games, VOYA co-founder Oliver Löffler and Axie Infinity’s Jeffrey “Jihoz” Zirlin unpack how it happened and what’s next.
A Game That Onboards First, Then Chains Later
Löffler, previously a founder at Kolibri Games, known for Idle Miner Tycoon, said the early wave of crypto games lacked staying power because the economics came before the experience. Craft World was built to reverse that logic.
“Most of the games back then were not really fun,” Löffler said. “They were innovating, but nothing stuck. We saw the opportunity to build something high-quality from the ground up.”
Craft World lets players produce and trade over two dozen tokenized resources, all earned through gameplay. The economy runs entirely on-chain, but players can start without ever touching a wallet or seed phrase. Its UX borrows heavily from casual mobile games, and distribution relies on paid user acquisition across Facebook and Google instead of NFT speculation or whitelist campaigns.
That low-friction onboarding has pulled in a hybrid audience of Web2 players and crypto-native users who stay for the gameplay loops rather than token drops.
Why Ronin Stepped In
For Jihoz, VOYA was too interesting to pass up.
“When I invest, I have to use the product. I played Craft World. It worked. And what really stood out was how they were thinking about monetizing attention,” he said. “If you can turn that attention into a way to balance the economy, that is powerful.”
The idea that attention itself can become the balancing force behind a game economy has been central to Ronin’s shift in strategy. Instead of relying on grants or one-off token emissions, Ronin is now testing programmatic incentive models like Kaito and proof of distribution. These systems aim to reward developers who actually bring users and value to the network.
This philosophy was reinforced publicly by Aleksander Larsen, Sky Mavis COO and fellow Axie co-founder, during his keynote at TOKEN2049. “It’s Darwinism at work,” Larsen said. “Bad actors get washed out. Attention and capital eventually flow to the right teams.” He criticized the trend of long-cycle, graphics-heavy Web3 titles with little crypto innovation, calling it a misalignment between design priorities and market reality.
That message echoes Jihoz’s view. He described Web3 gaming as going through a Darwinian phase, where only the teams that build responsibly, manage burn, and create sustainable economies will make it through. He named VOYA as one of the few studios taking that approach seriously.
Connecting Games With Dyno Coin and Voyager
Next in VOYA’s roadmap is Project Voyager, a meta-layer game built around Craft World’s economy. Players earn non-transferable Crystals by completing quests and social challenges. These Crystals determine access to Dyno Coin, a base currency that will be used across all VOYA titles once launched on the Ronin mainnet.
Voyager connects existing mechanics with future experiences. Craft World’s 25+ resource tokens will be usable across upcoming titles, creating what Löffler called a player-owned economy with meaningful interdependencies between games.
“We want to create a system where players can specialize and trade,” Löffler said. “If someone wants to gather wood in Craft World and someone else is crafting swords in an RPG, those resources should move between games. That is what we are working toward.”
Future titles include an AI-driven pet simulation game that interacts through platforms like Telegram and uses resources earned in Craft World to generate items that cycle back into the original economy.
A Breakout Case Study in a Shrinking Sector
In a year when investor sentiment has shifted and Web3 studios are closing weekly, VOYA and Ronin are operating with a different playbook.
Craft World was iterated publicly for over a year on testnet before its mainnet migration. Its play-first onboarding attracted more than 240,000 wallets without token bait. Its expansion is now being backed by $5 million in funding from 1kx, Makers Fund, and individual investors including Jihoz and Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget.
That momentum is translating into deeper integration with Ronin, which is evolving beyond Axie to support an entire gaming ecosystem. Zirlin described this phase as a necessary reframing of priorities, one where builders are rewarded based on real usage, not projections. Jihoz said the next breakout is likely to come from teams that innovate on user alignment, economic design, and product thinking. That’s where VOYA is actively experimenting.
With Project Voyager set to go live in the coming weeks and Craft World’s full mainnet transition underway, VOYA is betting that players are ready for something more connected, more usable, and more sustainable than the last cycle allowed.
